I hope that you have enjoyed the article \u201c4 Essential Vendor Collaboration Questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Today, I just conducted the monthly NLPA members-only webinar on the topic of vendor communication and how you have to be careful in your communications with vendors to ensure that your organization gets what it wants and avoids disputes.\u00a0 Doing that webinar made me think of how communication is done and, specifically, how true vendor collaboration as specified in the article needs to be done.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, I shudder when I teach certain procurement tactics that can be misused or at least sub optimally used.\u00a0 Negotiation is one example.\u00a0 If you say something verbally to a supplier \u2013 especially in a face-to-face setting \u2013 it is usually much more effective than writing it in an email.\u00a0 Same words, different medium, different result.<\/p>\n
Now, don\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019ve had students come to me, say they simply copied and pasted my suggested negotiation verbiage into an email and actually got suppliers to reply with serious cost saving proposal revisions.\u00a0 But, still, it is usually more persuasive to communicate face-to-face with someone who has your complete attention as opposed to someone who does what we all do with emails \u2013 try to get through them as soon as possible so they can get to \u201creal work.\u201d<\/p>\n
That same face-to-face recommendation applies to the vendor collaboration techniques that I mentioned in the article.\u00a0 If you want maximum vendor collaboration, communicate in person with your key vendors, don\u2019t just treat the four questions like a survey, although that is better than nothing and can lead to some incremental results.<\/p>\n
True vendor collaboration\u00a0is time consuming.\u00a0 It involves personal communication. It\u2019s based on back-and-forth conversation.\u00a0 But, done right, it can produce massive results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I hope that you have enjoyed the article \u201c4 Essential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":3992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n